Monday, April 13, 2009

Asking Guy Kawasaki to Purge the Ghostwriters from His Twitter Stream

Being honest is task 1 in today's social media milieu. If you are false, salesy, scammy, or overly self-promoting, you may end up alienating the folks you are hoping to attract and influence.

Thus my lambaste of Guy Kawasaki a few days ago. The author of The Macintosh Way had turned to the dark side and begun to use the powers of "the twitter force" for evil. So as his followers soared past 100k, Mr K saw an opportunity to make his influence even bigger. Perhaps in an attempt to make his Twitter persona larger than life. "How can he be so many places at once," many people asked when Guy would tweet about so many random and yet connected things.

But somewhere along the path our Twitter guide extraordinaire lost his way, discarded the connection and trust he had built with his initial followers and began to lend out his Twitter ID to 3 other people. I wonder if there was any hesitation as Guy gave out the password on his account. I have to imagine there was a twinge, "Use the force, Guy. Stay true to the force." [I'm sure we've been watching too much Star Wars at our house!]

And then it was done. People still commented about how prolific Guy K was. How he was one of the Tweeters to follow. And he was rewarded with status and numbers up near new President Obama. And still he was everywhere.

But the connection, the integrity of the Guy Kawasaki brand was lost. Though his picture was still on the messages.